For all the tedium, anxiety and misery of the Covid lockdowns, some of us experienced a strange sort of excitement too. Being banned from leaving the house or from seeing loved ones might have been agonising, but we could at least console ourselves with the idea we were living through A Major Event in history. We would tell our grandkids about this time. Movies would be made about it.
And yet, just as the UK’s official Covid inquiry gets under way, and less than 16 months after the last legal restrictions were lifted in this country, lockdowns not only seem to belong to a long gone past; they also appear to be fading, rapidly, from our consciousness. Many of us have only hazy memories of this period, and very little sense of when important events happened during it.
I remember a friend of mine remarking on this phenomenon back in the summer of 2021, when I visited her for the first time in more than a year. “This just feels too normal,” she said. “We went through so much suffering, and now it feels like it never happened.” Today, it all feels even more distant.